Paper.li Review

If you are on Twitter and follow Robert Scoble you have probably heard about Flipboard for the Ipad, which takes your friends tweets and Facebook post and creates a daily magazine out of them. Most people who have an Ipad say it is a must have application, if you don’t have an Ipad, but want a similar alternative you might want to give Paper.li a try. Paper.li is created by Smallrivers. With Paper.li, you can create up to 10 newspapers based on Twitter list, users or keywords. Each news paper is an aggregation of Twitter posts which meet one of those criteria and contain a link. Each newspaper updates at least once every 24 hours. f you want you can receive an email informing you of the update.

One of the coolest ways to use Paper.li is too use it along with Listerous. Listerous is a Twitter list directory, where you can find a list on almost any subject you can think of. You can take any one of those list and create a newspaper out of it in Paper.li For example I love Science, so I went to Listerous and found a list under the keyword Science that looked interesting to me. I created a newspaper out of that list. Now once a day I have a newspaper with all news about from that list about Science. The paper shows text, pictures and you can play video within it. It even has a live feed of tweets that are coming in realtime from that list. They appear to be working on a way to tweet directly from the paper, but I don’t think it is working yet.

There are a couple of things that I wish they would change or add to Paper.li. The first would be the ability to make one giant newspaper of all your newspapers. At the present time each newspaper is separate and when you want to go to a new one you have to navigate to it thru the tool bar. I also wish the newspaper could be update a little more often, especially when there is a hot topic in a paper’s area of interest. One thing I did notice is on occasion after you create a newspaper it doesn’t remain, when you log out. Another potential weakness for some people is it only pulls information from Twitter, unlike Flipboard which works with both Twitter and Facebook. The last thing is clearly a bug, after you log the first time through twitter and you come back it recognizes you immediately, but you still have to log in through Twitter. This project is in the early stage of development in fact according to the Smallriver blog it is still in public alpha, so I expect improvements overtime. Despite Paper.li growing pains I believe it has potential, especially for those of us who are looking for ways to curate information coming from Twitter. Have you tried Paper.li, what do you think of it. If you want to see some examples I created go to Twit-cast Daily or tech-news Daily.

Comments

Yes – I use paper.li with my Twitter account and one of the Twitter Lists I created — womenmarketers. I really like it for two reasons:

1. Because it sends out an auto post with the main accounts hyperlinked – those people see the post and RT like crazy. Which is good for so many reasons.

2. It is a really nice interface and very presentable. A lot of people think I spend time putting it all together, when in fact, it is completely automated. and honestly does a better job than I could.

It also makes you think a little more carefully about how to organize a Twitter List. The possibilities are awesome.

My two complaints – no revenue sharing (as there are several banner ads on the paper), and you can’t archive them.